We must fight Digital Cop City. Stop NYPD’s reach into all City agencies!
In July 2024, New Yorkers denounced the Mayor’s announcement of $225 million earmarked for construction of the “Unified Public Safety Training Facility”, NYC’s own “Cop City”. This has raised concerns about how hyper-militarized policing training will be weaponized against current and future generations of Black, Latine, migrant and poor communities.
This new training facility and the associated expansion of policing across agencies outside the NYPD is the most visible aspect of a long-standing grab for more police power.
What lies below the surface is a digital data collection and sharing infrastructure that expands the power of the NYPD’s and corporations. These technologies will become embedded into public infrastructures in ways that increase bias and inequality, and entrench the surveillance of people who rely on government services.
This “Digital Cop City” extends the NYPD’s digital infrastructure and data collection to all NYC agencies participating in this project. This inextricably links service delivery to data collection for the purpose of policing and punishment. It also creates more opportunities for corporate influence in public service governance as they shape and provide technological solutions.
Digital Cop City will expand NYPD reach into other City agencies. NYPD will train their enforcement staff. NYPD will have access to their digital infrastructure and data. This comes along with a “mayoral initiative to embed an NYPD member in each agency with an enforcement unit to enhance interagency coordination and streamline enforcement efforts.”
These are agencies tasked with providing supportive services to New Yorkers. Broken windows policing and stop and frisk show how the NYPD polices structural inequality and lack of access to essential services. Now, with Digital Cop City, the NYPD will be even more entangled with other agencies tasked with service delivery.
The administration claims that Digital Cop City’s tech infrastructure is unbiased, but in fact, it gives the cops and corporations access to way more information and power over how the future of our City is run.
New York City’s Wider Digital Surveillance Infrastructure
New York City and New York State officials are building a substantial digital infrastructure that will amplify the harms of what New York City plans to enact through “Cop City”. This includes the State of New York’s digital driver’s license, the consolidation of databases through the MyCity portal, and the construction of a NYC digital wallet for MyCity users. You can learn more about this through our recent report MyCity, INC: A Case Against ‘CompStat Urbanism’.
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My City Hearing
On September 30, 2024, the New York City Council Committee on Technology held an oversight hearing on the MyCity Portal, “a centralized platform for City services and benefits” that Mayor Adams and his administration claimed will be “a one-stop shop for New York City services and benefits.”
At the hearing, more than a dozen organizations testified. Many raised shared questions and concerns about the MyCity portal expanding policing powers throughout more City government departments and services, as well as the lack of data protection measures in the digital infrastructure being silently built to support it. Multiple organizations raised the alarm about how the corporate capture and outsourcing of these services to private contractors will have serious– and potentially dangerous– long-term consequences for the everyday life of New Yorkers.